Wow.
Who knew it was my mild case of panic that would make her speak today?
“Of course. I’ll be back in five minutes,” he said, standing up. “Regrettably, I have another appointment shortly after.”
“Thank you,” Mum said, watching as the man left his own office for us, then turned around. “Dad wanted you to have it,” she told me softly, pushing her hair away from her face. “He knew how much you loved the place as a child, and he thought you might be able to give it the love and attention it needs.”
“But you pretty much grew up there, Mum. It was a bigger part of your life than mine,” I said, taking her hand.
“I agreed with him.” Her lips formed a small smile. “I don’t want to take that on, Lottie. I’m sixty this year—I’m too old for all that nonsense. I’d just have to hire someone else to run it or give it to you anyway, and Grandpa already tried that after he moved. It was too stressful, you know that.”
“I don’t know how to run it,” I repeated. “And renovations? I don’t know the first thing about that!”
“We’ll be here,” Dad said reassuringly.
“What do you mean?”
“Your father’s military pension is generous, and I can work remotely,” Mum explained. “We’re going to sell the house and move back here.”
I stared at them both. “Wow. This day just keeps getting worse.”
She laughed lightly, squeezing my fingers. “Oh, darling. I’m sorry. I should have told you before what his plans were. I understand this is blindsiding you.”
Blindsided? Me? By all this? No, surely not. Not me. I was fine. This was fine. Everything was fine.
Thank God that little tangent stayed in my head.
“A little bit, yeah,” was what I actually said.
“Why don’t we go back to the house and get something to eat before the wake this evening?” Dad suggested. “There’s plenty of food there from the neighbours, and we can always head over to The Ivy to see what kind of state it’s in. I suspect your grandpa left you that money to spend on it.”
“I don’t… I… okay,” I finally said, a little helplessly.
That’s how I felt.
Helpless.
Talk about your life being turned upside down in a matter of hours.
“Wait, what about my job? I can’t just quit!” I said, looking at Mum.
“Of course you can,” she replied blithely, sitting back in the chair. “Your boss is an absolute bastard. Just tell him you aren’t coming back, and he can suck it.”
I stared at her. “I can’t say that!”
“Sure you can. What’s the rat-bastard going to do, drive all the way here to make you work your one-week notice? You’ve been trying to find a new job anyway, so here you go.” She made a sweeping motion towards the desk with the will with one arm. “And it has the added bonus that you won’t have to live with your parents anymore. That’s a win-win for everyone here.”
Dad’s lips curved into a smile. “She’s right. You are always complaining about both those things.”
“All right,” I grumbled, adjusting the skirt of my dress. “You might have a point.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Dad asked, looking at me with concern. “You said yourself that you have no idea what you’re looking at.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I’m still feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all,” I admitted. “I think I’ll just go, have a look around, and maybe we can all go tomorrow or something?”
“If you’re sure. I think your mum would like that.”
“She’ll feel better after some sleep, no doubt,” I said, buttoning my coat. “I’ll take some pictures of anything I think needs to be immediately addressed.”
“Good thinking, kiddo. Perhaps we should consider getting a surveyor in to really see the damage.”
I wrinkled my nose up. “Please don’t scare me any more than I already am.”
Dad grimaced. “Sorry. But it’s an old building, and it’s been a while since anyone was really in it. At the very least, we should get it surveyed for structural issues. I’d be surprised if there was anything majorly wrong, though.”
“I know. I guess I’m just hoping that it’s not going to be as bad as we think it is,” I said, a little wistfully. “Older houses tend to have better bones than new ones, so maybe it’s just cosmetic.”
“I do appreciate your optimism, Lottie.”
“You meant to say naivety, didn’t you?”
“Oh, you weren’t supposed to hear that.”
I laughed and dropped a kiss on his cheek. “It can’t be that bad, right? It’s only been four years since it closed, not forty, and I’m sure someone would have said if it was really awful.”
Dad wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know. It is pretty out of the way, and down by the dunes it can be rough in bad weather.”
“It’s not that close to the dunes.”
“No, but it’s rural enough at that end of town that there’s a good chance nobody has even been by there for two years. Wildlife, unruly youths…”
I waved my hands and picked my car keys up off the table. “Right, that’s enough. Stop scaring me. I’m just going to go, take a look, and think about the rest of it later.”
He raised his mug of tea in my direction, and I skipped out of the house. We’d only been here for a few days, and we’d been so busy with the funeral that none of us had been able to go to the old bed and breakfast yet.
Heck, we’d barely been into town. Today was the first time I’d actually driven through Fox Point properly, and now I was about to drive the entire length of town and see if I could remember where the turn-off was for the bed and breakfast.
I was going to get lost. For all the years I’d spent here as a child, I’d never actually driven myself. Everyone knew that directions as a passenger were vastly different to directions as a driver.
Unfortunately, I was good at neither.
Fox Point was a small seaside town in Norfolk that spanned several miles of coastline from chalk cliffs, through a sandy beach, up into wild dunes, and eventually down onto some marshland. It was the epitome of Victorian seaside town with an impressive promenade along the beach, vibrant beach huts, and a long pier that seemed to reach out to the horizon.
Unlike a lot of the towns surrounding it, Fox Point had managed to reject the need to expand into the green areas around the town, instead sustaining its crown as the number one staycation spot in the county. Even multimillion-pound building projects were wholeheartedly rejected by the local council for the most part, preferring to keep it all as the quaint little town everyone knew and loved.
It would lose its charm, and boy, did Fox Point have charm by the bucketful.
With under two thousand residents during the months of October to April—thirty thousand during the summer months, it felt like—it was like a strange little pocket of an England lost.
A true enigma.
Not only was it surrounded by rich, lush farmland, the high street was one of the few in the area that hadn’t fallen prey to richer corporations. There were a couple of chain clothing and shoe stores off the main street, and of course the bank was a national one, but everything else was small, independent, family owned.